The municipality of San Rafael del Sur also holds its stories. Here we can find characters like the elderly gentleman, Mr. Manuel Gutiérrez Pilarte. With good humor and enthusiasm, he boasts not only of having seen the Carreta Nagua, one of the most feared and ancient apparitions in Nicaragua, but also insists that he even rode on it over half a century ago and is still alive to tell the tale.
"It was around midnight, and four young men were still at the table playing, two against two. Then we heard something creaking down the street. Those men ran to their homes, and I stayed in the billiard room, waiting to see what was making that noise, and I saw that it was a cart," the old man asserts. "As the cart passed by the billiard room door," he continues, "I got on the back, and when I saw who was driving it, I only saw that it was a skeleton, full of bones, but I don't know why I wasn't afraid, and I kept sitting in the back until I realized that the cart was heading towards the cemetery. Then I got off and went home, in the darkness, because in those days people lit with oil lamps, and only a few houses had electric light," Mr. Manuel eloquently recounts.
After that event, Mr. Manuel says he was no longer afraid of anything, and the fame spread throughout the town until one day a friend of his, who doubted his courage, challenged him, saying that if he dared to go alone to the cemetery at midnight and leave a mark, he would give him one hundred córdobas.
"Those one hundred pesos are mine," he thought, and that same night he went alone to the cemetery and left a handful of dirt on top of a grave, convincing his friend who had to pay him the agreed amount, not without congratulating him first: "Aha, man, you really make me believe that you are brave!"
The story of Mr. Manuel Gutiérrez is an excerpt from "Don Manuel's Journey on the Carreta Nagua" by Orlando Valenzuela, published in La Prensa on December 3, 2000.
